I'm a narrative writer by nature, call it my years as a DM, call it my years as a novel reader, call it just how Matt writes, the point being, if I write something, I tend to think about it what's around what I'm writing and then sometimes put that down on paper (or the screen as well).
As a happy result of that, as Sean and I dealt with Step 15 of our building our island cluster, we did it in a narrative fashion.
Step 15 simply calls for you to name all your geography, both political and natural. We could have easily made a list and named everything:
Mountain: Named This
Town: Names This
etc.
But instead, for each island, we wrote a few simple paragraphs, naming each element as the step called for, but also added some background and rumors of what's around. None of it gives away anything that the average citizen of the area wouldn't know, and plenty of it hints at "what could be."
As I went over my ideas for what the PGtX (X being the name of the Island Cluster) would contain (I'll probably post a tentative ToC tomorrow), I realized what we've been writing perfectly covers the "mini-gazetteer" section of the PGtX. A few edits, look out for consistency, and some simple rewrites and clean up and suddenly a chapter of our first .pdf is already done!
Whats nice is that that next couple of steps will do the same thing. Step 16 asks for a history of the area, we can write that up, and begin pulling out what the average person would know for the PGtX and the total history which will import itself into the DM's Guide. Following that is a full paragraph on each feature named above, these would be full disclosure writing, with every secret revealed, and hopefully some plot hooks thrown in, again, filling out the "DM's gazetteer" section for that book.
I love it when a book just starts writing itself, that's always a good sign.
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